1st private moon flight passenger to invite creative guests

Maezawa announced on his Twitter and Instagram accounts that he plans to take a select group of artists with him on his trip around the moon saying: "I choose to go to the Moon, with artists", adding then "What will they see?"

"Ever since I was a kid, I've loved the moon", Maezawa said. And he doesn't want to go alone either. "I choose to invite artists from all around the world on my journey", he said. He's planning to take six to eight artists with him on the mission free of charge.

Tesla's Elon Musk has picked Maezawa, 42, founder and CEO of Japan's largest e-commerce company Start Today Co to fly on SpaceX.

The spaceship that Maezawa and his team of artists will be boarding will start making short test flights next year.

The flight around the moon is a marriage of Maezawa's diverse interests: to be a visionary, to support art and to promote his company. SpaceX says that only 24 humans have visited the Moon or its orbit in history, with the last one traveling on a 1972 Apollo mission.

SpaceX said previous year that it planned to send two private citizens around the moon in a Dragon crew capsule to be launched by a Falcon Heavy rocket. Its last rocket, the Falcon Heavy, had its first successful launch almost five years later than planned.

The whole trajectory of the trip, according to Musk, should take four to five days. Last year, he spent $110 million on a 1982 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

With SpaceX, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and entrepreneur Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic battling it out to launch private-sector spacecraft, the SpaceX passenger will join a growing list of celebrities and the ultra-rich who have secured seats on flights offered on the under-development vessels. "It's another opportunity. Somebody is going to get that opportunity to be in space", Lamm said. You have to be pretty loaded to score a tourist spot on a spaceship.

The BFR spacecraft's shape is reminiscent of the space shuttle, the bus-like United States spaceships that carried astronauts to space 135 times from 1981 to 2011.

Musk and other private spaceflight CEOs have been striving to fill that gap with spacecraft that can get crews to the ISS and beyond. SpaceX plans to launch the first unmanned mission to Mars by 2022 - a goal Musk himself has described as "Ambitious", with a sight to putting the first humans on the red planet by 2024.

He will become the first non-American to orbit the moon.

"Once operational Crew Dragon missions are underway for NASA, SpaceX will launch the private mission on a journey to circumnavigate the Moon and return to Earth".

"The reason for creating SpaceX was to accelerate the advent of humanity being a space-bearing civilization", Musk said during his opening remarks.

SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said last week that there was "no chance" that Musk's conduct will impact SpaceX's ability to win contracts, and that there's been "no impact at all" on the level of confidence in him on the part of the closely held company's backers.

And if you were wondering, "We'll do a bunch of test launches before having any people on board", Musk said.

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